You choose a story that seems perfect for your class. It is interesting, culturally rich, and filled with language your students have seen before.
You begin reading, and everything feels great. Students are listening. They are responding. They want to know what happens next.
Then, little by little, you start to lose them.
One student is looking at the clock. Another is flipping through the pages. Responses become slower. A side conversation begins. And suddenly, you are wondering: Is the story boring? Did I choose the wrong text? Do they even care?
If you have experienced this, you are not alone—and it does not necessarily mean the story failed.
In this episode of Growing With Proficiency: The Podcast, I talked with world language educator, author, and presenter Eric Richards about how he uses stories and reading across multiple levels.
Our conversation was filled with practical ideas, but one message stayed with me: keeping students engaged with stories is not about finding one magical activity. It is about creating the conditions that help students understand, wonder, connect, and reengage when their attention naturally begins to drop.
Why Stories Matter in World Language Classes
Stories are one of the most powerful tools we have in an acquisition-driven classroom because they give students a reason to listen and read.
We are not reading simply to identify a vocabulary word or find the answer to question number four. We are reading to discover what happens, understand a character, explore another perspective, laugh, imagine, and make meaning.
Stories also open the door to much more than language. Through them, we can:
- Provide meaningful and comprehensible input.
- Create opportunities for personalization and connection.
- Introduce real places, foods, traditions, and perspectives.
- Develop students’ confidence as readers and listeners.
- Invite interpretation, interaction, and communication.
A fictional character may eat ceviche in Peru. A scene may take place in a real museum. A character may use a regional expression. None of those details needs to become a separate “culture lesson.” Instead, culture can live naturally inside the story and offer students a small window into a bigger world.
But before students can connect with a story, they must be able to understand it.
1. Begin With Comprehensibility
The first question Eric asks when selecting or writing a story is simple:
Will my students understand it?
The language needs to be appropriate for students’ proficiency level, but that is only part of the decision. The story should also respect their age, maturity, and interests.
For beginning learners, however, we sometimes underestimate how engaging comprehension itself can be. A story does not need a complicated plot during the first weeks of Level 1. The moment students realize, Wait—I understand this in another language, they experience success.
That success can be compelling all by itself.
Eric also offered an important reminder for experienced teachers: when we think students have heard a structure enough, many of them probably still need more exposure.
That does not mean repeating the same sentence in the same way twenty times. We can vary the input by allowing students to:
- Hear the language in a story.
- See it written in a short passage.
- Respond to it through a gesture or action.
- Draw what they understand.
- Revisit it through a question, prediction, or conversation.
And when we discover that something is not as comprehensible as we expected? We pause, clarify, write it on the board, add a gesture, show an image, or reread.
No judgment.
The goal is not to prove that we taught it already; the goal is to help students understand the message in front of them.
2. Build Confidence and Curiosity
Eric describes two essential drivers of engagement: confidence and curiosity.
Students need the confidence to think, I can understand this.
Without that belief, they are much more likely to disconnect. When the text feels inaccessible, curiosity disappears because students no longer have enough meaning to wonder what comes next.
Once students feel successful, we can nurture curiosity. We can pause before an important moment, invite a prediction, change our pace, or end with a small cliffhanger.
We do not need dramatic plot twists on every page. We simply need to give students a reason to keep listening or reading.
This changed the way I think about the word compelling. We can put so much pressure on ourselves to find a story that will fascinate 100% of our students 100% of the time.
Honestly, that story probably does not exist.
But when students understand the language and become curious about what is happening, we have already created two powerful conditions for engagement.
3. Add Emotion and Personal Connection
Stories become more memorable when students feel something. They may laugh, feel surprised, become nervous for a character, disagree with a decision, or feel indignant about what happened.
Our delivery can help create that emotional investment. A change in pace, a dramatic pause, a gesture, or a shift in our voice can make the story feel alive.
This does not mean we have to perform with huge energy every day. It simply means communicating our own interest in the message.
We can also pause and connect the story to students’ lives:
- The character has a dog. Who else has a dog?
- The family is eating a particular food. Who has tried it?
- The character makes a difficult decision. What would you do?
- The story takes place in a real city. What do you notice or want to know about it?
These quick connections tell students that the story is not separate from them. It is an invitation to communicate.
4. Vary What Students Do While Reading or Listening
If we want students to remain engaged, we cannot always ask them to sit still, listen, and answer teacher questions for an entire class period.
Eric shared several low-prep ways to vary the experience without abandoning the story:
- Use reader’s theater or invite students to act out a short scene.
- Let students perform a line of dialogue.
- Ask students to sketch a character, setting, or important detail.
- Pause for a partner retell in the common language or target language, depending on students’ proficiency and the purpose of the task.
- Invite students to move left or right to show a prediction or answer true-or-false.
- Use mini whiteboards for a quick response or drawing.
- Stop for a brief personal question connected to the text.
Eric also reads aloud to his students and sometimes invites students to read aloud in the target language. He recognizes that this practice is not universally embraced and that not every student will enjoy it. In his classroom, however, he has seen students become more comfortable—and sometimes genuinely excited—about reading aloud over time.
The larger takeaway is not that every teacher must use every strategy.
It is that engagement is often sustained through variety. We can keep the class anchored in the same meaningful story while changing how students interact with it.
5. Notice When Engagement Begins to Drop
Even with a strong story and thoughtful planning, attention will wane. That is part of teaching real students in a real classroom.
Eric watches for signs such as:
- Glazed expressions or eyes moving toward the clock.
- Delayed responses.
- Students asking where the class is in the text.
- Page flipping or difficulty finding the current section.
- Fidgeting or growing side conversations.
Those behaviors give us information. They do not automatically mean students are lazy, disrespectful, or uninterested.
This part of our conversation really resonated with me because I know how quickly I can fall into what I call the judgment trap.
When I start thinking, They do not care. They are not paying attention. They should understand this, I become frustrated. From that frustration, I am more likely to react by adding more questions or turning the activity into a surprise test.
But judgment does not help me see what my students need.
When we recognize disengagement as information, we can respond with curiosity:
Do they need less cognitive weight?
Do they need movement?
Do they need a faster comprehension check?
Do I need to clarify the language?
That shift does not mean teachers will never feel frustrated. As Eric reminded us, we are human. The goal is not to eliminate the emotion. The goal is to notice it and choose a response that helps us move forward.
6. Use a Quick Reset—Then Return to the Story
When engagement drops, Eric recommends changing either the students’ physical state or the cognitive weight of the task.
A reset can be very small:
- Stand and stretch for 30 seconds.
- Change seats.
- Turn to a partner and retell what has happened.
- Draw one detail from the story.
- Respond to a prediction by moving to one side of the room.
- Answer one quick question on a whiteboard.
- Use a brief choral response.
The reset does not need to become a completely new activity.
In fact, Eric prefers to keep it short so the class does not lose the flow of the story. We are simply helping students return with a little more energy or a little less cognitive load.
I love the idea of planning a few reset activities before we need them. When we already know our options, we are less likely to react from frustration and more likely to respond intentionally.
7. Check Comprehension Without Turning Reading Into a Test
Comprehension questions are useful and necessary—but they are not the only way students can show understanding.
Eric suggested changing the response mode and keeping many checks brief:
- Thumbs up or thumbs down.
- Stand or sit for true-or-false statements.
- Point to the sentence that contains the answer.
- Draw the setting, character, or action.
- Write an answer on a mini whiteboard and reveal it together.
- Retell part of the story to a partner.
- Write a question about the text.
Having students write questions can reveal both what they understand and what caught their attention.
For beginners, those questions can be written in their common language if the goal is to check comprehension. Students who are ready can write in the target language, or the teacher can provide support by assigning a question type: write a who, what, where, or how question.
This is such an important distinction:
The response should match the purpose.
If I want to know whether students understood a new reading, I should not accidentally make the task much harder by requiring language they are not yet ready to produce.
Writing questions in the target language may be a valuable goal for another moment. But during a comprehension check, I need to stay focused on comprehension.
The Sweet Spot: Accountability and Enjoyment
Eric described the balance he looks for as a “sweet spot.”
Students understand the story, remain accountable for meaning, and also have enough space to experience the reading as something enjoyable.
That means we do not have to attach a long list of questions to every page. We can check comprehension along the way, respond when students need support, and then return to the message.
Because ultimately, we want students to move beyond:
I am reading this to find an answer.
We want them to think:
I am reading because I want to understand the story.
I want to know what happens next.
I can do this.
Final Thoughts: A Story Can Fall Flat and Still Be Valuable
The same story can feel completely different in two sections of the same course. One class may laugh and react to every detail. Another may listen quietly. A story that worked beautifully last year may not create the same energy this year.
That does not automatically mean the story is bad—or that our teaching was ineffective.
Engagement is dynamic. Our students, class chemistry, time of day, and even our own energy change the experience.
Our job is not to manufacture perfect enthusiasm. It is to provide comprehensible, meaningful language; pay attention to the learners in front of us; and adjust when needed.
Stories give us a beautiful vehicle for all of that. Through them, we can build language, connection, curiosity, and cultural competence.
Some days, the magic will be obvious. Other days, it will be quieter.
We keep learning, adjusting, and trying again. Poco a poco.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Eric Richards for more ideas about selecting stories, sustaining engagement, using read-alouds, and checking comprehension.
